Fielding woes plague Sox again
It’s happening again.
A year ago, the loss of Trevor Story resulted in devastatingly deficient defense by the Red Sox. Story’s absence prompted the move of Kiké Hernández from center field to shortstop, and Hernández’s poor play there — which led to a revolving door of instability at short — along with defensive butchery from Masataka Yoshida, Rafael Devers, and Triston Casas rendered the Sox the worst defense in baseball.
According to Baseball Savant, the 2023 Red Sox defense cost the team 50 outs relative to an average team — the second-worst performance of any defense since reliable public tracking data was introduced in 2016.
This year, the team vowed, would be different. The return of Story, a commitment to Ceddanne Rafaela in center field, the removal of Yoshida’s glove, and improvement at the corner infield spots (especially Casas) would remake the team’s defense.
It seemed to be working. The Sox proved capable of winning games with pitching and defensive excellence on their season-opening, 7-3 West Coast swing. But when Story suffered a season-ending shoulder injury last Friday, that blueprint got crumpled and dropped into the rubbish bin. The defense went with it.
Story suffered his injury in the fourth inning of last Friday’s game in Anaheim. In 54 subsequent innings, including Thursday’s 10-inning loss to the Orioles, the Sox allowed a staggering 13 unearned runs (2.2 per game). They’ve permitted 16 on the season, most in the big leagues. Through Thursday, Baseball Savant pegged the Sox as five outs below average — 26th in the big leagues, with an infield six outs below average (tied for 27 th).
In a terribly small sample, the Sox have failed to turn ground balls into outs without Story. Opponents had a .192 average on ground balls against the Sox through April 4. In six games since then (beginning with the game where Story was injured), that mark has skyrocketed to .338.
“Out conversion at this level is a must and we’ve been missing a lot of routine plays the last five or six games and we’ve been paying the price,” said manager Alex Cora. “We can’t give big league teams more than 27 outs and we’ve been doing that lately.”
The latest implosion came in the eighth inning of a winnable game on Thursday, when Pablo Reyes (filling in for Devers) kicked a ball at third to start an Orioles rally, and a failure by David Hamilton, Story’s replacement, to step on second on a potential inningending double play extended it long enough for Baltimore to get a go-ahead, two-run homer. It was the pivotal sequence in setting in motion an Orioles victory that concluded a three-game sweep.
The Red Sox have a jarring infield problem — again. The loss of Story has left them with a gaping void — again.
“I have no idea who plays shortstop [for the Red Sox] this season,” one scout texted prior to Thursday’s game.
Minor league defensive metrics peg Hamilton as a shortstop with plus range, but scouts are widely skeptical of him at the position. His speed creates excellent range that has been visible at times, but in the big leagues, he’s struggled to make routine plays.
Statcast had him as two outs below average in roughly 90 innings at short last year. In three games this year, he’s misplayed a rocket that was hit directly at him by Miguel Sanó, failed to field a potential double play grounder, then failed to step on the bag. The Sox insist Hamilton will be part of their shortstop mix without Story — but already there are echoes of last year’s revolving door.
“[Hamilton] is a good defender. He is. And we’ll keep running him out there,” said Cora. “We’ve got to turn the page with [Story]. He’s not going to be here, that’s the bottom line, and we have to step up. Whoever is playing, they’re capable. They showed it in camp. We played some clean baseball.”
It would be wrong to peg the problem just on shortstop and Hamilton. Both Devers (two outs below average) and Reyes (three outs below average) have struggled, and the second basemen are defensively limited.
Casas appears to have taken a sizable step forward defensively — a reminder while watching Hamilton that young players are capable of adjusting to the speed of the game and improving with experience — but the overall performance of the infield has been woeful for the past week.
The Sox have significantly increased their pregame defensive work this year. They’re taking infield as a group on a near-daily basis, rolling back the clock and doing regular outfield work throwing to bases.
“It’s not going to be lack of trying, lack of effort,” said Cora. “You see it with the things that we do in pregame: infield/outfield, throwing to the bases, using machines. Everything that we adjusted to get to the point that we were feeling really good about our defense, we’re going to keep doing. We’re not going to stop. It’s a matter of keep helping [the players] to slow down the game and this will turn around.”
It has to if the Sox are to play meaningful games this summer. As good as the team’s pitching has been — remarkable, with a major league-leading 2.36 ERA through 13 games — the Sox aren’t equipped to win when they give away outs and runs. Almost no one is.
Since the start of 2023, the Sox are 18-30 when allowing an unearned run, including 1-5 this year. Leaguewide in that span, teams have a .336 winning percentage in the 1,221 games where they allowed an unearned run.
If the Sox are to defy expectations of a last-place finish, their pitching will have to carry a considerable load — one that must also be shouldered by the defense. In a week without Story, the defenders have buckled under that weight.